Choosing the Right Journal

You’ve spent weeks or months writing your manuscript, carefully considered every word, organized and reorganized the content, revised it, got feedback and revised some more. Finally – it’s ready to share with the world! Choosing the right journal to submit your manuscript to is important. You want to make sure your article reaches its intended the audience – the people who will be most interested in the information, will benefit from it, and will be most likely to apply it to practice. In addition, manuscript reviews take time, sometimes a very long time! You want to make sure you’re investing that time with the right journal.

Here are some things to think about when considering where to send your manuscript:

Identify your target audience and what journals or other sources they most likely are reading.

Look at where articles on your topic have been published.

Look at the reference lists of articles in your literature review to see where related articles have been published.

Consider the journals published by professional organizations you belong to or that represent your specialty.

Ask colleagues what they are reading.

Once you have a few choices, send out query letters. You can only submit to one place but you can send out multiple query letters. We’ll talk about query letters in a future post.

Don’t go automatically for the journal with the highest impact factor. Yes, it is important to get your article in a well-read, respected journal, but if it doesn’t reach the people who will use and benefit from the information then you haven’t really made an impact at all.